Salt and Saffron

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All right, don’t scoff, mock or disbelieve: we live in mortal fear of not-quite-twins.

Of course, reduce all stories to their basic elements and you’ll see all families are possessed of prejudice — that alternative name for ‘fear’. The only thing that makes us stand apart is our particular choice of … I want to say ‘bugaboo’. I often want to say ‘bugaboo’. It’s a word that demands to be said out loud, particularly among bilingual Pakistanis who recognize its resemblance to ‘baghal boo’ or ‘armpit odour’, but its meaning ‘object of baseless terror’ makes it misleading in this conversation. Nothing baseless in our terror; we have five hundred years of empirical evidence on which to base our fear of not-quite-twins. Ours has always been a scientific family, that way. So I suppose we are unusual. Because, though we are like all families in the almost religious fervour of our prejudices, all the other families we know can point to nothing but stereotype, ignorance and jealousy of their own privilege as a basis for those prejudices and, I’ll admit, our contrasting historicity has always made us feel superior.

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